Finished February Doll – Bead Journal Project 2010

I really wrestled with this month’s bead journal, and I’m pleased with the outcome.  It represents a major shift in my work, as I try to bring my love of the southwestern desert together with my love of beading.  As I mentioned in previous posts, my goal was to work with a color palette based on my photographs of favorite desert places, and for this doll I started with a photo of Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park in southwestern Utah, not too far from Zion National Park.

This is the palette I've chosen for February. Coral Pink Sand Dunes, in southwestern Utah, is one of my favorite parks. It's also a treasure trove of amazing rocks and fossils, which I've collected over the years.

Cautious after my initial February “Big Head Jane” adventure, I started by beading modestly around a copper face cabochon, and then created a “body” out of herringbone in orange beads (matching the sand of the dunes).  Then I coralled around the base of the body, to match the green vegetation at the park. She’s about 3″ long.

The toughest part of trying to capture the desert in a beadwork project is that the desert is so monumentally huge, and beads are so… tiny.  So, the question became: how to create the vast in the context of the miniature.  It also seemed important to me to set my little orange beaded doll into a background, in order to give her some context.  So I decided to try my hand at bead embroidery — a completely new technique for me. (I was really inspired by all you wonderful bead embroidery experts!)  I decided to work the background for the doll as if I was looking through a spyglass.  It’s about 2.5″ in diameter. In the end, it came out like this:

At that point, it was time to merge background and foreground.  I wanted the little doll to swing free, so I attached the bead embroidery round to the top bail of the doll, creating a pendant with depth and (a little) motion.  The sky, by the way, is done with turquoise beads over a pink/purplish background color, because I wanted to give the sky some depth of color.  Desert skys are often layered with luminscent color over color — even green!

If I had it to do over, I’d make sure the mountains were out of the same small beads that I used in the rest of the embroidery. The use of the larger beads was deliberate because mountains, after all, are pretty big, but I think the piece would have been smoother with finer mountains.  Live and learn.  Other than that, I’m happy with the result.

What makes this little doll a bead journal, and not just a piece of jewelry, is that I’ve been spending a very cold, snowy February fantasizing about the desert, and I’ve been dreaming about the sun against my skin.  Switzerland is pretty in the winter, in a kind of snow-globe kind of way, and the mountains are high and impressive, but there’s a weird feeling of being trapped in a decorative rather than a natural landscape.  Lovely as it can be here, it’s not a place I can feel at home, so I’m making home in my head and in my art.